Police Officers May Be Placed In Middle, High Schools

They are everything from caring confidantes to hard-nosed cops who will arrest students who take one step too many over the fine line between right and wrong.

They are professional police officers throughout Broward County who have carved out a place for themselves in the public schools. Gone are the innocent days of the old-fashioned hall monitors.

Some of the officers are retired; some are active cops on duty; some are part-time reserves; some are off-duty cops earning a little extra money while policing school grounds. School officials say the officers, who in many cases carry guns and wear a full uniform, are needed to maintain security.

In Broward`s schools, that can mean anything from arresting drug dealers to breaking up fights between teen-age girls outside home economics classes, from recovering stolen cheerleading jackets to confiscating guns, knives, machetes and nunchakus, weapons used in various Oriental methods of hand-to-hand combat.

``We don`t have kids in Broward County that are any different than kids in Palm Beach County, Chicago or New York,`` said Howard Stearns, director of security for the school system. ``Their ferocity all depends on the neighborhood they come from.``

At present, there is no central plan for security personnel in individual schools. Some schools have two security people; some have none.

A plan to reconcile those inconsistencies is being studied by School Board member Marie Harrington, who advocates putting a uniformed officer in each of the county`s 22 high schools and 27 middle schools.

Her proposal is based on a similar program in the Tallahassee area, where the Leon County Sheriff`s Office has been stationing officers in secondary schools since 1981. The officers there do some informal counseling and conduct programs on drug-abuse prevention, she said.

Broward Sheriff Nick Navarro said he is serious about the idea and will develop a pilot project with school officials to place officers in as many as three middle schools and three high schools.

While the program would probably cost in excess of $100,000 next year, the sheriff contended it would be money well-spent:``It would bring us closer to the young men and women of our community.``

In some ways, school officials said, the shift reflects larger changes in society.

``A lot of people don`t understand why there`s security in schools,`` said Tom Vigoreaux, a security specialist at Miramar High School and a former reserve officer with the Hallandale police.

``They don`t want to believe that their kids can cause trouble. They think of what school was like when they were there, when trouble was a water gun or popping someone with a wet towel in the showers.``

In the last few years, Broward schools have experienced a number of violent incidents that grabbed headlines:

(BU) At Sunrise Middle School earlier this year, Fort Lauderdale police had to respond when a dozen 13-year-old girls began fighting in a hallway. One of the students was later found to be carrying a Ninja throwing star -- another Oriental weapon that can have sharpened or unsharpened points -- and an ice pick in her purse. She said she was carrying them for protection from classmates who were threatening her.

(BU) At McArthur High School in Hollywood earlier this year, a 16-year-old student was hospitalized with head injuries after he said he was beaten and repeatedly kicked in the head by a group of 15 students.

(BU) At Rogers Middle School in Fort Lauderdale last year, two 15-year-old students were charged with extortion and battery after officials said the pair tried to force another student to pay them ``protection`` money, chased him out of school and made him swallow amphetamines.

(BU) At McArthur High School last year, a lunchtime confrontation between more than a hundred black and white students ended with one police detective injured and four youths arrested. The scuffle was caused after a white student blamed blacks for the robbery and assault of a teacher several days earlier. The teacher received 15 stitches in her head after being struck by bolt cutters in the attack.

The problems are not unique to Broward. In fact, Broward has been successful in decreasing the overall number of incidents of crime in the schools for several years in a row, security director Stearns said. In the 1983-84 school year, for instance, the number of violent and nonviolent crimes dropped by almost 5 percent.

However, the number of assaults on school personnel increased from 27 to 42 in the 1983-84 school year. The number of assaults on students jumped from 208 to 259, according to the statistics.

Figures are not available for the current academic year.

The philosophies of the security officers who deal with those problems differ from school to school. Principals are free to choose their own security people at the school`s expense. Some schools, such as Fort Lauderdale High, opt to employ a rotating crew of off-duty uniformed officers.

The Plantation and Coral Springs police departments are Broward`s only two law enforcement agencies that foot the bills to keep officers stationed full- time at the two high schools in each city.